'Diaries' review: The evolution of Orwell

"George Orwell" was not born George Orwell. Officially Eric Blair, he first used the "Orwell" when he published "Down and Out in London and Paris" in 1933, in part for a reason today's confessional writers might well find almost unethical: He did not want his "slumming" to worry his parents. He was not born "George Orwell" in another sense too -- that while his need to enter and describe the world around him both began early, the experiences and understanding distilled in the defining masterpieces of his final years, "Animal Farm" (1945) and "1984" (1949) accumulated gradually. His "Diaries," first published in England two years ago, are some of the observations out of which that distillation occurred.

The first thing that must be said about these 11 separate notebooks kept under various circumstances between 1931 and 1948 is that they are not all equally compelling. The number of eggs laid by the various chickens in his life was clearly a matter of great interest to Orwell -- in two sequences in November 1938 his entries consist of nothing but "One egg," "Two eggs," and so on -- but their importance is purely personal. This is not true of the three diaries centered on the Second World War whose notes and comments about the public atmosphere and events of the period between the summer of 1939 and the autumn of 1942 have an immediacy that no history written later could ever re-create. Not only was the war itself, and London's experience of it, changing from moment to moment, but Orwell's perceptions of the underlying political forces also were always evolving.

"In the middle of a fearful battle in which ... thousands of men are being killed ... one has the impression that there is no news," he wrote in June 1940 of the coverage of the evacuation of Dunkirk. "As to the truthfulness of news, however, there is probably more suppression than downright lying."

By April 1942 he was less charitable. "Nowadays one takes it so much for granted that everyone is lying that a report of this kind (about the bombing of Tokyo) is never believed until confirmed by both sides. Even an admission by the enemy that his capital had been bombed might for some reason or other be a lie."

Two months after that he concluded he was living in a "labyrinth of lies." From there, it is not so far to "1984."

Another thing that must be said about Orwell's "Diaries" is that, other than the eggs, etc., they are largely intellectual. He is rejected by the army because of his tuberculosis, he and his wife are unable to have children, his wife dies, he becomes gravely ill himself and almost all he reveals about his responses to these afflictions is an occasional "depressed." Instead the diaries are about what is happening outside himself, entries recorded with that characteristic blending of how something looks with what it means that makes his readers not only able to see it through his eyes but unable not to. When he notes in 1931 that the law requires the beds in the lodgings for the unemployed, with whom he is tramping, to be a certain number of feet apart "but there is not and never will be a law to say that the beds must be reasonably comfortable," the reader automatically sees not only the beds but the whole social system, bureaucracy included, to which they belong. When he describes a 1941 "national day of prayer" that asks God "to ... help us to forgive (our enemies)" but says "nothing about our enemies forgiving us," the "jingoism," "self-righteousness" and "absence of self-criticism of any kind" of which he complains amplify the spirit both of his time and ours.

In one of his last essays, "Why I Write" (1947), Orwell said, "What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art." His "Diaries" were among his means to that end. He died Jan. 21, 1950, at 47, a few months after the publication of "1984." In his two late, great works he captured the political, social and technological life forces of his time so perfectly that it is hard to see how we would have understood the 20th century without him. What is perhaps most amazing is that he lived through only half of it.